Towards a 3D Virtual Game for Learning Object-Oriented Programming Fundamentals and C++ Language Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Results

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Towards a 3D Virtual Game for Learning

Object-Oriented Programming Fundamentals and C++

Language Theoretical Considerations and Empirical

Results

Fahima Djelil, Benjamin Albouy-Kissi, Adélaïde Albouy-Kissi, Eric Sanchez,

Jean-Marc Lavest

To cite this version:

Fahima Djelil, Benjamin Albouy-Kissi, Adélaïde Albouy-Kissi, Eric Sanchez, Jean-Marc Lavest.

To-wards a 3D Virtual Game for Learning Object-Oriented Programming Fundamentals and C++

Lan-guage Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Results. International Conference on Computer

Sup-ported Education, May 2015, Lisboa, Portugal. �hal-02455125�

Towards a 3D Virtual Game for Learning Object-Oriented Programming

Fundamentals and C++ Language

Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Results

Fahima Djelil

, Benjamin Albouy-Kissi

, Ad´ela¨ıde Albouy-Kissi

, Eric Sanchez

and Jean-Marc

Lavest

1_{Laboratoire Institut Pascal CNRS-UMR 6602, Universit´e Blaise Pascal, Clermont-Ferrand, France} 2_{EducTice, Institut Franc¸ais de l’Education, Ecole Normale Sup´erieure, Lyon, France}

{fahima.djelil,benjamin.albouy,adelaide.kissi,j-marc.lavest}@udamail.fr, eric.sanchez@ens-lyon.fr

Keywords: Object-Oriented Programming, Game Based Learning

Abstract: Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) paradigm is one of the most common paradigm in introductory pro-gramming courses. However, novices often have difficulties to understand the basic concepts which are of a high level of abstraction. Either tangible and virtual constructive games provide the students with a more fa-miliar way for learning programming. This paper applies a construction game metaphor approach for learning OOP concepts and C++ syntax. After introducing some tangible and virtual constructive games for learning programming, we present an experimental prototype of a new 3D virtual game for learning OOP called PrOgO as well as the results of an experiment conducted with beginner student using PrOgO.

1

INTRODUCTION

Learning programming can be perceived difficult from novices (Yan, 2009; Overmars, 2004). A novice student has to face a primary challenge which is problem solving, he has to understand how a com-puter program runs and has to learn a specific syn-tax in which his program will be transcribed. Ab-stract concepts understanding is another challenge. The basic Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) con-cepts which are on a higher level of abstraction have become the most common programming concepts for introductory programming courses, and the transition to the OOP paradigm has proven to be more difficult than expected (B¨orstler et al., 2008). Therefore, a lot of systems have been designed to support the ac-quisition and development of programming concepts. They aim to take abstract programming concepts to the real world for learners. They are based either on tangible interfaces or on virtual simulations and games that connect with the learners interest. This has proven to be very engaging and empowering for novices (Cooper et al., 2000; K¨olling, 2010).

In this work, we apply a construction game metaphor approach for learning OOP. Our ultimate goal is to provide novice students with realistic and relevant representations that will help them in

learn-ing OOP concepts and C++ programmlearn-ing syntax in an entertaining way. For this purpose, we present an ex-perimental prototype of a new three-dimensional (3D) virtual game for basic OOP concepts such as class, object, object creation, method invocation, parame-ter passing and object destruction. First we present a literature review on tangible interfaces and virtual environments for learning programming (section 2), then we describe our first prototype of the game we called PrOgO (section 3) and finally, we describe an experiment we conducted with beginner students us-ing this prototype, we will proceed to interpret the re-sults (section 4) and to extract the corresponding con-clusions (section 5).

2

THEORETICAL BACKGROUND

There have been several tangible interfaces for learn-ing programmlearn-ing which aim to brlearn-ing the abstract con-cepts of programming closer to the real world, to be more easily graspable (Jetsu, 2008). These interfaces consist of tangible components i.e. physical and me-chanical that the user can assemble to construct pro-gram’s sequences. One of the first tangible program-ming interfaces was Radia Perlman’s Slot Machine (Perlman, 1976) which was based on the LOGO

pro-gramming language. LOGO was one of the most widely used programming languages for beginners (Jetsu, 2008), allowing students to use the computer to control a robotic turtle to follow their instructions (Papert, 1980). Slot Machine allowed students to con-trol either a real mechanical robot or a screen based simulation of such a robot (Perlman, 1976). Algo-Block is another interface that is somewhat similar to Slot Machine. It consists of a set of physical blocks that connect to one another to form a program (Suzuki and Kato, 1993). Each block corresponds to a single command in the LOGO programming language. The term tangible programming language was invented by Suziki and Kato in order to describe the AlgoBlock collaborative programming environment (Suzuki and Kato, 1993). Topobo is another example of this kind of interfaces that was designed to learn programming thinking (Raffle, 2004), it consists of a set of active and passive blocks which can be combined together to assemble and animate robotic structures. The active blocks are embedded with a kinetic memory which allows recording and playback of physical motion of the constructed assembly. This constructed assembly is animated by moving passive blocks that are con-nected to the active ones. After the animation has been created, it can be played back by pressing a but-ton (Raffle, 2004).

Several environments have been designed with a view to reduce the complexity of programming learn-ing for novice students and increase their motivation. These environments use graphic representations to in-troduce abstract programming concepts and allow stu-dents to create games and animations by manipulating programs. Alice (Conway et al., 2000) and Green-foot (K¨olling, 2010) are examples of such environ-ments, which strive to engage students by allowing them to write programs about games, stories and sim-ulations. One of the important characteristics of Al-ice and Greenfoot is a design that explicitly visual-izes fundamental concepts of OOP in a realistic and a meaningful context. Students do not typically start by manipulating source code, they rather start by cre-ating objects by selecting graphics which represent classes. Once an object has been created, it can be placed into a 2D (Greenfoot) or a 3D (Alice) scene, when the object is selected the user can see all its methods which constitute all its available actions it can perform. Once a method has been selected, the user can see immediately the effect of its execution onscreen. After the students are introduced to the fun-damentals of OOP, scenarios that have been already implemented are presented to them enabling easy ma-nipulation of programs in their syntax. This charac-teristic is very interesting for novice students, since it

has been proved (Cooper et al., 2003; K¨olling, 2010) that this helps novices to avoid syntax errors while fo-cusing on understanding abstract concepts before ma-nipulating source code. According to (Utting et al., 2010), these environments’ principal harks back to Logo’s turtle. Since they reify objects so that the re-sult of command execution is visible as the position, size, rotation, and other visible state and behavior of the object changes. These environments provide high-level commands like move and hide low-high-level details such as graphics primitives.

By analogy with any construction game such as Topobo, a screen based simulation of such a game that allows students to manipulate 3D graphics to create and animate robotic structures, whereas each graph-ical elementary block represents an object, would be relevant to introduce OOP concepts. Indeed, an object is an active entity within a program, including a set of attributes (knowledge) and methods (skills) that act on its attributes to achieve some functionalities which are the objectives of the program.

3

A 3D VIRTUAL GAME

PROTOTYPE FOR LEARNING

OOP FUNDAMENTALS AND

C++ PROGRAMMING

LANGUAGE

A constructive game dedicated to learning OOP fun-damentals, should enable students creating objects, visualizing their state and behavior, interacting with them by executing their methods and make them com-municate with one another. Direct manipulation of graphics representing object-oriented concepts can help students, as in real life, to think in terms of ob-jects. The student should be able to create as many class instances as he likes. The concept of inheritance can be materialized by creating new objects based on other objects having the same behavior with new at-tributes or the same atat-tributes with new behaviors. The concept of composition can be represented by objects that contain other objects. In order to enable the student to understand more easily the implementa-tion of the abstract concepts in a specific syntax such as C++, all his manipulations executed directly on the graphics should be interpreted into source code. Since the representations are very precise, each stu-dent’s action can be interpreted into a C++ instruc-tion. This will constitute a complete program, that the student can visualize and modify in order to prac-tice programming, after the abstract concepts are well understood.

Figure 1: PrOgO main window showing a realization example.

This design principle provides students with a pri-mary introductory step to OOP concepts, through fun and realistic 3D graphics, before manipulating source code. This also allows students to express their own creativity, and provides them with an engaging learn-ing tool.

PrOgO (Object-Oriented PrOgramming) is an ex-perimental prototype which has been developed as a proof of concept of such a game. This prototype gen-erates C++ source code corresponding to direct ma-nipulations of 3D graphics. Figure 1 shows the inter-face of PrOgO with an example of a student’s realiza-tion. The interface comprises 3D elementary blocks representing classes that the student can instantiate to obtain objects, a 3D scene to place in the objects that have been created, and a separate tab anchored on the right side of the 3D scene to display the C++ code that is being generated during the direct manipulations of the 3D graphics. Once an object is created and placed into the 3D scene, the student can view all its meth-ods, and invoke them. Once a method is executed, its result on the state of the object is immediately visu-alized, and the corresponding C++ code is automat-ically generated. Each object has three elements of state that are automatically visualized on screen: a po-sition which is specified in x, y, z coordinates, a rota-tion and a color. Separate objects can connect to one another and assembled objects can be disassembled. Each of these can be manipulated trough method calls

to create a robotic or a mechanic structure. Note that the code generated is not yet editable.

4

EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

In the Institute of Technology of le Puy-en-Velay (University of Auvergne, France), the course Fun-damentals of Computer Science is imparted in the first year of the Degree in Digital Imaging. This course consists of two main topics: Introduction to al-gorithms and programming, and OOP fundamentals. The first topic covers the basics about programming on C++: data types, variables and operators, con-trol flow statements, arrays and pointers, procedures and functions, dynamic allocation. The students, at this stage, are initiated to C++ procedural program-ming and don’t have knowledge about OOP. The sec-ond topic is an introduction to OOP in C++: classes and objects, encapsulation, composition, inheritance, polymorphism, etc.

We have experimented PrOgO with the first year students in Digital Imaging Degree. This experimen-tation aims to identify potential design, ergonomic and pedagogical issues of the game, and intends to provide a conceptual basis for a future evolutive pro-totype on the basis of the students’ expectations in terms of learning and entertaining aspects.

This was conducted after the students have com-pleted the first topic of the course, and once they started the second one. They have been introduced for the first time to some elementary concepts such as class, object, encapsulation and method invoca-tion. The participants were a total of 48. Their aver-age aver-age was 18.7 years and all except one reported to play to video games very frequently (31 participants play every day and 16 of them play several times a week). They also mostly reported not to play to seri-ous games (37 participants don’t play against 11 who play regularly). We collected pictures of the graphical realizations (Figure 2) as well as the corresponding generated source code files, to determine whether the students were getting involved into the game. We also recorded all the students’ actions within logs includ-ing objects creation and destruction and method calls within the 3D scene, as well as code selection within the tabs containing the code which is automatically generated and the code which is already implemented that includes the declaration of the available classes. This have been made in order to know whether the students make the effort to engage in understanding the relationship between the 3D graphics and the gen-erated code, rather than only manipulating the graph-ics in the 3D scene. We also used an attitude sur-vey which is focused on participant’s experience and opinions about using PrOgO in the future for learning other OOP concepts. They were asked to rate the ped-agogical and entertaining aspects of the game, to indi-cate whether they have improved their understanding of the concepts of class, object, method invocation and C++ syntax related to these concepts, and what aspects of the game they would like to be improved.

From the collected graphical realizations (Figure 2), we can observe that some students clearly suc-ceeded to construct complex and meaningful struc-tures. This indicates that the students were quiet engaged in the game and motivated to accomplish the game’s objective. From the generated interaction logs, we observed that the students were mostly fo-cused on manipulating graphics in the 3D scene. The logs have shown that the actions that have been mostly performed are objects instantiating and objects meth-ods calls such as assemble(), translate() and rotate(). Some students were also interested to analyse the gen-erated code, since the logs included actions such as ”select code” and ”select tab”.

From the attitude survey, we collected the stu-dents’ opinions expressed upon four levels (not at all, sparsely, quite, a lot) about the amusing and peda-gogical aspects of PrOgO, as well as improvement of their understanding of the presented concepts. Table 1 summarizes the obtained results. We have linked

Figure 2: Some students’ realizations.

the amusing judgement to the student’s frequency of play to video games and the pedagogical judgement to the student’s frequency of play to serious games and we compared the obtained results. We concluded that the students have mostly found PrOgO sparsely or quite amusing and quite pedagogical, regardless of the fact that they play every day or several times a week to video games, and the fact that they play or not to serious games, since the obtained results are not very different from the separate students cate-gories, as it is reported in table 1: 51% of the students who play to video games everyday and 39% of those who play several times a week stated that they have found PrOgO ”sparsely” amusing. 39% of the stu-dents who play everyday and 44% of those who play several times a week found it ”quite” amusing. They are totally 47% to find it ”sparsely” amusing and 41% to find it ”quite” amusing. Moreover, no one of the students who play to serious games has found it ”not at all” pedagogical, 58% rather found it ”quite” ped-agogical and 34% found it ”sparsely” pedped-agogical, those who don’t play to serious games have mostly found it ”quite” pedagogical (67% against 22% who found it ”sparsely” pedagogical).

We have also concluded that the students have mostly sparsely or quite improved their understand-ing of the presented concepts (class, object and re-lated C++ syntax), regardless of the fact that they previously understood these concepts in classroom or not. As it is shown in table 1, the students who said that they have already understood these concepts in classroom have though improved their understand-ing ( 44% stated that they have ”sparsely” improved

Table 1: Participants’ opinions about PrOgO collected in the attitude survey.

comparison item participants not at all sparsely quite a lot

how is PrOgO amusing?

students who play to video games everyday

10% 51% 39% 0%

students who play to video games several times a week

17% 39% 44% 0%

all 12% 47% 41% 0%

how is PrOgO pedagogical?

students who play to serious games 0% 34% 58% 8%

students who don’t play to serious games

3% 22% 67% 8%

all 2% 25% 65% 8%

how did you improve your understanding of the concept of class?

students who think they have al-ready understood in classroom

16% 44% 36% 4%

students who think they have not understood in classroom

8% 59% 33% 0%

all 12 % 51% 35% 2%

how did you improve your understanding of the concept of object?

students who think they have al-ready understood in classroom

26% 37% 26% 11%

students who think they have not understood in classroom

3% 54% 43% 0%

all 12 % 47% 37% 4%

how did you improve your understanding of the syntax related to the concepts of class and object?

students who think they have al-ready understood in classroom

39% 33% 28% 0%

students who think they have not understood in classroom

3% 62% 32% 3%

all 16 % 51% 31% 2%

their understanding of the concept of class, 37% have stated the same regarding to the concept of object, and 33% regarding to the syntax of these concepts). There are also a number of them who stated ”quite” improv-ing their understandimprov-ing ( 36% regardimprov-ing to the con-cept of class, 26% regarding to the concon-cept of object, and 28% regarding to the syntax of these concepts). Most of the students who thought not to understand before in classroom have also presented quite similar percentages (59% stated improving ”sparsely” their understanding of the concept of class, the percentages for the concepts of object and syntax are respectively 54% and 62%). A lot of them have reported having ”quite” improved their understanding of these con-cepts, the percentages are respectively (33% , 43% and 32%).

We gathered some students’ statements regarding to what they learned, during the experiment such as: ”I have learned how to declare an object and how to make method calls”, ”I understand more about the C++ syntax, and this tool can help me to review some concepts at home for example”, ”I understand better the syntax related to object instantiation and method calls, especially about pointers”, ”I understand better the relationship between the class and the object”.

We have also collected the students opinions about

using PrOgO in the future for learning additional con-cepts, and linked the results to their judgements re-garding to weather they found it amusing, pedagogi-cal and attractive. We concluded that the students who want to use PrOgO again are mostly those who found it quite amusing, quite pedagogical and quite attrac-tive, and those who don’t want to use it again are those who found it sparsely amusing, sparsely pedagogical and sparsely attractive (Figure 3).

Furthermore, we asked the students what aspects of the game they would like to be improved. The an-swers were mostly about ergonomic and learning as-pects. Most of the students indicated that they would like more graphical elements, and more options such as having the possibility to construct other objects from the available ones, in order to be able to manipu-late groups of objects. Most of the students expressed an interest in modifying the generated code, to inter-act more easily with the virtual environment and to have more freedom in their actions.

5

CONCLUSIONS

In this work, we have applied a construction game metaphor for learning OOP and C++ programming

(a)

(b)

Figure 3: Using PrOgO in the future according to weather the students found it amusing, pedagogical and attractive: a) students who want to use PrOgO again. b) students who don’t want to use PrOgO any more

language. We have presented a first experimental pro-totype of a 3D virtual game called PrOgO by which abstract OOP concepts are represented in a meaning-ful and a visible way, and we experimented it with the first year students in Digital Imaging Degree.

From the analysis of results presented in the pre-vious section, we concluded that although PrOgO is at the prototype stage, the students have mostly found it quite pedagogical and amusing. They also mostly sparsely improved their understanding of the concepts of class, object, object instantiation, method calls and C++ syntax related to these concepts. Moreover, more than half of them stated that they want to use PrOgO in the future for learning additional concepts, and most of them have expressed the wish to have more options regarding to the interaction interface and the content of the game, such as having the possibility to modify the generated code, which is something we have already planned to do before. Although this work is a preliminary study, such results are signifi-cant. In this sense, a stable release of the game could have a positive influence on the learning of OOP ba-sics as well as C++ programming language.

Actually, we work on the design and the devel-opment of an evolutive prototype dedicated to tactile interfaces such as tangible tabletops and tablets. This

work allowed us to validate our design principal, es-pecially the construction metaphor on which the game is based on, and the students feedback allowed us to confirm the extensions we have already planned for a future evolutive prototype. A future work will also include the study of the impact of PrOgO on the stu-dents motivation and learning.

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